This valuable collection aims to trace Ovid's metamorphic presence in twentieth-century Italian literature, focusing on the aesthetic trajectory of the Latin poet's reception in poetry and prose. As the editor states in the introduction, the essays ‘take as their objective to verify how Ovid has entered an author's poetics’ and to study the effects ‘on the aesthetic plane’ of the connection between Ovid and his modern readers (p. 17). Attention rests on the literary tradition throughout the book; the few socio-historical elements of Ovidian reception considered (e.g. Chapter 1) mostly function as contextual background to the investigation on poetics. If the study's exquisitely literary character and formalist approach may, as Comparini puts it, ‘inspire disagreement’ (p. 16) among the advocates of cultural studies, the book is nevertheless an important contribution to classical reception scholarship about Italy.
The volume intends to tell an alternative, although inevitably partial, history of twentieth-century Italian literature, placing Ovid centre stage and, arguably, on a par with Virgil. Arranged diachronically, covering a period from the 1880s to the 2000s, the fourteen essays offer an initial record of the literary presence of Ovid in modern Italian literature. They provide insightful and original contributions to the study of canonical Italian authors, bringing to light an Ovidian literary network. Methodologically this is carried out through a historical-philological approach. Textual analyses and close readings are privileged, and Ovidian rewritings are investigated in the context of individual writers’ oeuvres and the history of Italian literature.
The study inserts itself in the burgeoning scholarship on the re-uses of the ancient Classics and their tradition in Italian modern literary culture. The last ten years have witnessed a growth in Classicists and Italianists’ critical interest in the classical tradition and reception. The twentieth century has catalysed recent scholarly attention, catching up with the numerous studies on the medieval and the early modern periods (e.g. C. Caruso and A. Laird, Italy and the Classical Tradition [2009]). The literary focus of Comparini's book dialogues with existing work on the role of translation of ancient Greek and Latin Classics in the Novecento. Relevant examples include P. Zoboli, La rinascita della tragedia (2005) on translation of classical tragedy, F. Condello and A. Rodighiero's edited volume Un compito infinito (2015) on literary translation of Greek and Latin Classics, and the recent volume by T. Franco and C. Piantanida (edd.), Echoing Voices in Italian Literature (2018), published a few months after Comparini's, exploring the relationship between classical reception, literary tradition and translation in the Italian twentieth century. Comparini rightly points out that the Ovidian tradition in twentieth-century Italy has not received as much attention as it deserves (p. 14). A handful of scholarly articles do exist – for instance, M. Fucecchi's essay on translations of Latin elegy by contemporary Italian poets in Condello and Rodighiero (2015, pp. 121–32). Much more has been written on Ovid and his reception in medieval and early modern Italy (e.g. B. Guthmüller, Ovidio Metamorphoseos Vulgare [1981] and R. Black, ‘Ovid in Medieval Italy’, in J. Clark, F. Coulson, K. McKinley [edd.], Ovid in the Middle Ages [2011]). While T. Ziolkowski's comparative study Ovid and the Moderns (2005) remains a fundamental point of reference for anyone approaching modern Ovidian reception in Europe, Comparini's edited volume is the first to address the unceasing presence of Ovid in Italian twentieth-century literature.
From its very title the book illustrates that the Italian Ovidian fortune pivots around the Metamorphoses, a repository of archetypal mythical narratives, and especially a model of metamorphic poetics and multiplicity. By virtue of the protean character of Ovidian reception, references to Amores, Ars amatoria, Fasti, Tristia, Heroides and the Epistulae also abound. The essays are divided into seven sections underlining the multifarious Ovidian presence in twentieth-century Italy. After the first section on ‘Ovidian Philology’ by S. Casali, the investigation zooms in on the works of individual writers from Giovanni Pascoli to contemporary Italian poetry.
Casali sketches the varying scholarly and editorial fortune of Ovid throughout the century. His contribution is the only one in the volume dealing more extensively with cultural and socio-political aspects of Ovid's reception in modern Italy. He considers the poet's relative misfortune in the first half of the twentieth century, worsened by the Fascist regime's preference for Virgil, and Ovid's later rediscovery in the 1950s on occasion of the bimillennial of his birth. This socio-cultural outline of Ovidian history, Comparini suggests in his introduction, ‘must be read in parallel with the rewritings, readings and interpretations at the hands of twentieth-century Italian poets and prose writers’ (p. 18). Although Casali's work provides a relevant cultural framework, this task is mostly left to the reader. The lack of a more thorough integration of the literary analyses with the philological and critical history of Ovid at times strikes as a missed opportunity of this otherwise admirable book.
The subsequent material presents a captivating literary analysis, thus organised: Section 2, ‘Ovid and the (Two) Italian Crowns’, considers the poetic reception of Ovid in the works of two foundational poets of the Italian literary tradition, Giovanni Pascoli and Gabriele D'Annunzio in essays by F.I. Sensini and R. Bertazzoli; Section 3, ‘Ovid and the Lyric, Part I’, moves on to discuss the intertextual presence of Ovid in Eugenio Montale's poetry with a paper by M. Colella; in Section 4, ‘Ovid between Modernism, Magism, and Surrealism’, A. Giammei, L. Lijoi and L. Bardelli explore Ovidian metamorphoses in the development of modernist rewritings of myth, considering respectively the prose writings of Massimo Bontempelli, Alberto Savinio and Tommaso Landolfi; Section 5, ‘Interdisciplinary Ovid’, spans 50 years between 1940s and 1990s with essays by R. Galvagno, B. van den Bossche and V. De Gasperin. The only truly interdisciplinary essay of this section is Galvagno's, which explores Carlo Levi's reuses of the Ovidian myth of Daphne and Apollo in both his poetry and his paintings; it is followed by van den Bossche's contribution on the role of the Metamorphoses in Cesare Pavese's Dialoghi con Leucò (1947) and De Gasperin's study on Ovidian echoes in tales of metamorphoses in Anna Maria Ortese's fiction. Section 6, ‘Ovidian Rewritings between Modernism and Postmodernism’, continues the excursus with a paper by B. Olla on Carlo Emilio Gadda's engagement with the myth of Narcissus, Comparini's essay on Italo Calvino's influential postmodern reading of Ovid and S. Pietrosanti's study of Ovid in Antonio Tabucchi; the final section, ‘Ovid and the Lyric, Part II’, closes the book with a rich essay by A. Fo on the various traces of Ovid in recent Italian poetry up to the twenty-first century, offering a broader perspective on the European context. The volume also includes a useful index and a ‘Bios and Abstract’ section.
The metamorphic character of the Ovidian literary tradition in Italy emerges strongly in this first mapping. As the table of contents shows, the various sightings of the Ovidian presence recorded in the collection embrace starkly different types of engagement with the source text. Charted re-elaborations range from direct quotations, intertextual references, textual rewritings and metanarratives, to fleeting allusions and indirect re-elaborations of the idea of metamorphosis as a hermeneutic or cognitive system. These manifestations of Ovidian reception are based on diverse poetics and reflect the writers’ varying degree of knowledge of the Latin language and literature. Considering writers’ positioning with respect to the Ovidian model, three main approaches emerge: writers that establish a direct and explicit intertextual relationship with several Ovidian texts (e.g. Pascoli, D'Annunzio, Bontempelli, Gadda, Levi, Savinio, Calvino, Tabucchi); writers who are mostly concerned with the Metamorphoses as a veiled yet deliberate intertext (e.g. Pavese, Montale); and writers whose works engage with Ovidian myth or metamorphosis as a literary function or a trope. This last form of reappraisal, considered, for instance, in the essays by Bardelli on Tommaso Landolfi and De Gasperin on Anna Maria Ortese, produces much subtler echoes. Beyond a shared poetics of metamorphosis or a common interest in forms of ‘transformative change’, such as those enucleated in I. Gildenhard and A. Zissos (edd.), Transformative Change in Western Thought (2013), in these instances the direct connection between the modern text and the Ovidian model is not immediately evident.
The changing forms of Ovidian reception in Italy and the writers’ varying attitudes to the Ovidian source constitute one of the most remarkable aspects of this study. Given its miscellaneous nature, such an exploratory collection can only begin to record and map these differences. The initial research gathered in the volume, however, paves the way for further investigation into the relationship between the aesthetic parabola of the Ovidian tradition and the cultural context fostering it. For instance, the publishing history of Ovidian works or the fortune of Ovid in visual and popular culture are only cursorily touched upon.
An exploration of the broader Ovidian reception in Italy seems to be particularly relevant when the relationship between the modern texts and the Latin model is not granted by the writers’ explicit engagement with Ovid, whether in the original language or in translation. As van den Bossche notes: ‘Ovid's Metamorphoses seem to belong to a category of literary works that have circulated so widely in Italian and Western literary culture that they have fully blended into a repertoire of characters, motifs and storylines that function more like what Gérard Genette has called a literary architext rather than as a distinctive intertext’ (p. 199). He is echoed by A. Fo, who remarks in the closing essay that ‘one cannot always distil a specific relevance to the inheritance left by his Metamorphoses before various forms that the motif has taken on in Western literature: but the feeling is that the example of his method has left, perhaps at the level of a collective unconscious, a decisive impression on the poetic reading of the world’ (p. 313). Setting his analysis of an Ovidian poetic function in contemporary Italian lyric within the European Ovidian tradition, Fo's essay gestures towards this end. Yet, overall, in a volume concentrating methodologically on textual and philological consonances between Latin and Italian texts, it is precisely the investigation of this Ovidian collective unconscious and its cultural manifestations that remains more underdeveloped.
This collection makes a compelling argument for the existence of an Ovidian strand in twentieth-century Italian literary history. Through rigorous historical and textual analyses of a series of Ovidian sightings, it enriches our knowledge of both Ovid's literary reception and modern poetics. It also lays the fundamental groundwork for further studies to encompass the cultural, social and political ramifications of the Ovidian presence in Italy, representing a significant contribution to the scholarship on classical reception in the twentieth century.
